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Make his home environment encouraging and rich with resources (books, hobby interests, music, music instruction,etc...). Encourage his interests outside of school, much like you'd encourage a child who is good at baseball to play little league. If he is good at building/science, Lego sets (esp the ones with the gears, robotics...), erector type stuff, etc...If he is artistic, have materials and a workspace for him...You get the picture, I am sure.
Those score discrepancies stuck out to me too. I'd keep an eye on things and pursue it if they are significant (which is what some people here seem to think - I don't know enough about them to give an opinion).
The cogat focuses on reasoning skills in several ways to help determine whether or not a child can have a successful educational experience. While it can be an indicator of giftedness, it shouldn't be the only factor used in the final determination.
Having said that, in considering non verbal, it's far more than the term spacial awareness. It's being able to see something and understand in "pictures" instead of language what the relationship is to something else. Those adults, for instance, with lower levels in non verbal cannot plan a new room arrangement without either drawing it out or moving things several times. They cannot estimate how much pizza to order for a large group without actually counting people and slices. They cannot assemble a piece of furniture without instructions. All of those type things are easily and quickly done by those with higher scores in non verbal.
For kids, the child with higher level non verbal ability is the one who easily masters things like shape sorters, puzzles and building towers. They see a triangle outline on the sorter and and instantly recognize that it's different from a square or a circle so they discard those shapes without trying to fit them in. This child sees a puzzle with 6 farm animals and easily matches the shapes of the piece to the corresponding place on the puzzle board. This child understands, without being taught, that a tower needs a bigger base in order to stay standing.
Reading, math and science come easier because they have a great understanding of concepts and they do not usually have to work through a problem to get to the answer or do something repetitively to learn the concept.
They easily understand the concept that adding an 'e' to the end of a word such as 'rid' changes it to a long 'i' sound or that 'ou' makes different sounds in different words and from then on can make the connections without further thought. (though, through and sound for example)
When given a large square, small square and a large circle, they recognize that what's missing is a small circle to complete the math pattern. When shown a horizontal line and a vertical line they can distinguish which is longer without measuring.
In science, reasoning is a huge part of the subject. It's the whole "If-then" concept in a nutshell. If you plant a seed then it will grow into a plant/tree. If you mix dirt and water, then you get mud. If you put ice outside in the summer, then it will melt. They don't need to do these things to learn them or to even watch them being done, they can visualize it in their heads and 'get it'.
So, offer him plenty of opportunity to do things that challenge his mind in regards to reasoning in those non verbal ways to help him develop that aspect.
Give him a set of wooden or metal brain teasers. Bookmark a site with optical illusions for him to play with. Buy a 3D puzzle, an ant farm and microscope for him. Crossword puzzles, word searches, mazes and color/paint by number are all things that can be fun and require non verbal skills. Games like Tetris, Bejeweled, Sudoku and even Solitaire can promote those same non verbal reasoning skills.
We are focusing on not allowing dyslexia to slow her down. The program she has puts a focus on speed and teachs patterns so even when encountering new words, she'll be able to spell them because she's learned the pattered. It has proven to us that it works because in her independent writting, she has written words she has not written before and got them correct for the patterns she has already learned. The best part of it is that the program will be done at the most over 7 years and at the least over three, I'm thinking it'll be about four. It can be used with anyone, dyselxic or not, adult or child and does not even have grade recommendations for beginning. The only thing it shows is a list that tells you what percent of kids in each grade 1st through 6th would spell the word correctly based on the way that public schools teach spelling.
Anyway, by the time that she gets to SAT's, no one will be able to tell that she has dyslexia as it will not show in her work. The best thing I can do right now is be ever careful in marking things wrong on account of poor spelling. In her grammar work, she often has to write paragraphs. She is told she will lose a point for every wrongly spelled word. Often she can look up the words in that lesson or a previous lesson such as one that shows examples of words like easy, easier, and easiest. If she doesn't make the ie and keeps the y, she gets it wrong because the example is there for her to look back at if she so chooses. The other ones she gets wrong are the ones in the patterns we have already done in spelling but I've only found one mistake with that so far.
I like it better this way because the schools are the only ones in real life that are going to give a crap about it. It isn't like she will be able to have the signature at the end of her emails say: "Suzy the Dyslexic." Regardless, if she spells poorly, she will be seen as less intelligent and less likely to be given advancement opportunities or be taken seriously. If she is honest about having dyslexia, it would create forgiveness in her spelling but the thoughts would be the same: unintelligent, not worthy, ect. It would not make a difference. The best thing we can do is teach her to overcome it, like someone with one leg shorter being taught to walk without a pronouced limp. If people can not see it, they will not know and she will not be treated differently because of it.
I guess I am comfortable with the label beacuse I know it is a measure of a gifted out of the box thinker. You can't overcome dyslexia....you can compensate or cope with it. It won't go away. I don't expect any less of her than my other child...I just know they have different strengths. If others are uncomfortable or judgemental because of the label well let's see if their child can build a robot. Its like withholding medicine because you see illness as a weakness. I don't see it as a disability just a difference.
I guess I am comfortable with the label beacuse I know it is a measure of a gifted out of the box thinker. You can't overcome dyslexia....you can compensate or cope with it. It won't go away. I don't expect any less of her than my other child...I just know they have different strengths. If others are uncomfortable or judgemental because of the label well let's see if their child can build a robot. Its like withholding medicine because you see illness as a weakness. I don't see it as a disability just a difference.
Overcome means: conquer problem: to struggle successfully against a difficulty or disadvantage
Actually, you pretty much can overcome dyslexia. You have to realize two things. The first is that dyslexia is different from person to person. You have reading dyslexia where an individual only had problems with words looking backwards and other reading difficults while reading but they know how to spell just fine. You have conprehension dyslexia where an individual can read and spell just fine, they just have problems comprehening certain things. You have spelling dyslexia, such as my 8 year old daughter, who can read at a college level, comprehend nearly as well yet can not spell worth crap for patterns she has yet to learn and gets numbers and letters backwards. Even numbers, she is doing algebra work, at the average of a 7th grade level, and writes p's for her 9's still every once in while. You could have a combination of these issues and the issues reange in severity, such as a woman I know who loves to read but has to get books on tape because she never had proper instruction with specifically trained professionals, which public schools lack as they are very expensive.
The second is that you can, with the proper materials, learn to overcome these issues, especially if you can provide your child with one on one instruction through all subjects so that there is always someone over her shoulder gently pointing out every mistake as they make them. (another reason homeschooling as been so great for us) When we realized what was going on with DD, we decided to do a series of things to make it much easier for her. She learned to read at age three but she had difficulty reading some words, regardless of having spent two years already reading. The first thing we did was set up a reading challenge. We let her control it. We told her that books could be like money and so many books could equal a prize. We let her choose what she wanted, a new bike, and then how many books she thought it was worth, 1000, which we cut in half. Four months later, her reading profiency increased dramatically, with us allowing her to read as many books as she wanted to each day, decided herself how long it would be before she got her own book. It was amazing.
The next step was to try and evaulate what she was doing well in academically and try to find a spelling program that would take advantage of those strengths. DD was doing extraordinarily well in math, where she saw patterns and sequences years abover her peer group. I began to search for a program that taught spelling in sequences. We fould Sequential Spelling, made by a dyslexic for dyslexics, or anyone for that matter. In school, words put together for spelling tests don't make sense. They are set up to try and trick and confuse kids with words with similar sounds that are spelled differently. This program throws away all that and teaches a pattern, starting with a word like in and growing it one day at a time until it becomes the word beginning. Kids also learn in different ways..audio, visual, kinesthetic, oral...and the program is designed to cover each word with each of these to cover all the learning styles. Each word is also corrected immediantly so that they can see their mistake right away vs waiting a full weekend and not really knowing why their words are wrong. They cover tricky words and repeat words like the word 'would' over and over to make sure they grasp it. DD learned, along with the word beginning, disagreeing, moodiest, schooling, knitting, unfolding, withholding, mouldy/moldy, allotting, knotting, loviest, among many others in just the first unit. Not bad for a 7 year old, not to mention one with dyslexia.
The third step is/was word meaning. I remembered how I learned to break words apart in chemistry class to learn what whatever I was looking at was made up of and how I caught onto the patterns really quickly. I thought, "Hmm, instead of teaching classic old vocabulary, maybe we could reverse it by learning all the roots." Hence Roots and Fruits being added to the curriculum this year, which teaches all the Latin and Greek roots. We will start that in January. Vocab has not been an idle subject though, as we have worked on math and grammar vocab as to test her knowledge of various types of nouns, verbs, pronouns, present/past progressive/perfect tense verbs, ect. Again, not bad for an 8 year old now, especially one with dyslexia.
The other thing is regarless if you or I see it as a disability or not, the rest of the world is. For DH and myself, we regard the whole issue as our responsibility to prepare our daughter to be the best she can be in the real world and be able to function well enough so that most people around her would never know she has dyslexia. One advantage is that DH has dyslexia, with the same issues DD has, and we can skip right over all that didn't work for him and spend less time finding what will work.
Now, to say that we could never overcome it, can you please explain to me how DD, who had a mild issue with reading due to dyslexia, how she is right now reading Eragon and how she has read many books of this complexity? How is it she comprehends what she is reading, going from just ONE year ago where she was between 2 and 3 grade levels behind in comprehension (I mean as in my 3 year old could get the meaning of a of a very simple paragraph as where she could not at age 5, though she seemed to know what she was reading on her own, but struggled with the simple placement excercises.) to starting off this year testing out of the 7th grade which was the highest placement test we had? You can NOT tell me that a child can not and will not overcome it. Accepting the things that make us different and making sure our children grow up healthy mentally in spite of it is one thing. Saying that a child can't will only enable them to not and live with that.
However, we now know that reading problems can be identified in early childhood and, with the appropriate support, there is a good chance struggling readers will go on to become good readers. A groundbreaking study by researchers at Yale University School of Medicine revealed that when children are taught solid decoding skills (connecting sounds with letters) early on, and get prompt, intensive help in learning spelling, vocabulary and comprehension skills, they can indeed master necessary reading skills. In fact, researchers discovered — through comparing brain scans of struggling readers with those who received intense help — that the intervention helped "turn on" and stimulate the brain's reading systems.
The reason I am typing as extensively and as passionately as I am is that I want to make sure that others with dyslexic children can get factual information. Please don't take it as an attack. I have faced this issue for 8 years and various issues with my two sons their entire lives so it is something I become passionate about.
Gifted children often do have one or more learning difficulties. Finding them, tailoring programs to their specific needs, and then being very proactive about it, gifted kids, if only because they are gifted, have a high chance of overcoming those difficulties.
You will probably need further testing to determine if he is learning disabled or not (the vast majority of LD children do have average to above average full scale IQs). As someone else mentioned, a big discrepency like that can indicated a learning disability. Being a true dyslexic is actually rare and the term is way overused. Keep in mind too that letter and number reversal in first grade is common. As a matter of fact, a child with NO LD issues can commonly reverse things like b's and d's up until the middle of second grade. I think I would insist of further testing actually just to get an better overall picture of the child's strengths and weaknesses. He could indeed be gifted, but to determine that usually requires testing by a psychologist. Group tests are not good indicators of giftedness, low IQs or learning disabilities. Achievement tests are also not good indictators as they just let you know what the child has achieved up to this point. Our DD is gifted. Her teacher suggested testing before her Otis/Lenon ability test scores came back (a group test) and when they did, her score was only 99. Since she was on the list they went ahead and did psychological testing, though I suggested pulling her off the list because I then had major doubts. The teacher refused and her full scale IQ ended up being a 131, so you just never know. I just share that to show that unless the child is individually tested by a psycholgist or other "expert" the test score may not be a true indication of the child's abilities.
Thank you everyone for your input and advice. I have gotten a lot of good ideas on how to enrich his homelife. I have also ended up with a lot more questions than answers as far as his scores, what they mean or don't mean, how the test was done, etc. I think I am most appreciative of this. I now have a lot more research to do, talking with the school, and decisions. Mainly: do I have him take more tests (even just the one he already did to collaborate the first results) or do I just not worry about it. I only question the former route because of the large difference in the different scores and what that may mean.
Overcome means: conquer problem: to struggle successfully against a difficulty or disadvantage
Actually, you pretty much can overcome dyslexia. You have to realize two things. The first is that dyslexia is different from person to person. You have reading dyslexia where an individual only had problems with words looking backwards and other reading difficults while reading but they know how to spell just fine. You have conprehension dyslexia where an individual can read and spell just fine, they just have problems comprehening certain things. You have spelling dyslexia, such as my 8 year old daughter, who can read at a college level, comprehend nearly as well yet can not spell worth crap for patterns she has yet to learn and gets numbers and letters backwards. Even numbers, she is doing algebra work, at the average of a 7th grade level, and writes p's for her 9's still every once in while. You could have a combination of these issues and the issues reange in severity, such as a woman I know who loves to read but has to get books on tape because she never had proper instruction with specifically trained professionals, which public schools lack as they are very expensive.
The second is that you can, with the proper materials, learn to overcome these issues, especially if you can provide your child with one on one instruction through all subjects so that there is always someone over her shoulder gently pointing out every mistake as they make them. (another reason homeschooling as been so great for us) When we realized what was going on with DD, we decided to do a series of things to make it much easier for her. She learned to read at age three but she had difficulty reading some words, regardless of having spent two years already reading. The first thing we did was set up a reading challenge. We let her control it. We told her that books could be like money and so many books could equal a prize. We let her choose what she wanted, a new bike, and then how many books she thought it was worth, 1000, which we cut in half. Four months later, her reading profiency increased dramatically, with us allowing her to read as many books as she wanted to each day, decided herself how long it would be before she got her own book. It was amazing.
The next step was to try and evaulate what she was doing well in academically and try to find a spelling program that would take advantage of those strengths. DD was doing extraordinarily well in math, where she saw patterns and sequences years abover her peer group. I began to search for a program that taught spelling in sequences. We fould Sequential Spelling, made by a dyslexic for dyslexics, or anyone for that matter. In school, words put together for spelling tests don't make sense. They are set up to try and trick and confuse kids with words with similar sounds that are spelled differently. This program throws away all that and teaches a pattern, starting with a word like in and growing it one day at a time until it becomes the word beginning. Kids also learn in different ways..audio, visual, kinesthetic, oral...and the program is designed to cover each word with each of these to cover all the learning styles. Each word is also corrected immediantly so that they can see their mistake right away vs waiting a full weekend and not really knowing why their words are wrong. They cover tricky words and repeat words like the word 'would' over and over to make sure they grasp it. DD learned, along with the word beginning, disagreeing, moodiest, schooling, knitting, unfolding, withholding, mouldy/moldy, allotting, knotting, loviest, among many others in just the first unit. Not bad for a 7 year old, not to mention one with dyslexia.
The third step is/was word meaning. I remembered how I learned to break words apart in chemistry class to learn what whatever I was looking at was made up of and how I caught onto the patterns really quickly. I thought, "Hmm, instead of teaching classic old vocabulary, maybe we could reverse it by learning all the roots." Hence Roots and Fruits being added to the curriculum this year, which teaches all the Latin and Greek roots. We will start that in January. Vocab has not been an idle subject though, as we have worked on math and grammar vocab as to test her knowledge of various types of nouns, verbs, pronouns, present/past progressive/perfect tense verbs, ect. Again, not bad for an 8 year old now, especially one with dyslexia.
The other thing is regarless if you or I see it as a disability or not, the rest of the world is. For DH and myself, we regard the whole issue as our responsibility to prepare our daughter to be the best she can be in the real world and be able to function well enough so that most people around her would never know she has dyslexia. One advantage is that DH has dyslexia, with the same issues DD has, and we can skip right over all that didn't work for him and spend less time finding what will work.
Now, to say that we could never overcome it, can you please explain to me how DD, who had a mild issue with reading due to dyslexia, how she is right now reading Eragon and how she has read many books of this complexity? How is it she comprehends what she is reading, going from just ONE year ago where she was between 2 and 3 grade levels behind in comprehension (I mean as in my 3 year old could get the meaning of a of a very simple paragraph as where she could not at age 5, though she seemed to know what she was reading on her own, but struggled with the simple placement excercises.) to starting off this year testing out of the 7th grade which was the highest placement test we had? You can NOT tell me that a child can not and will not overcome it. Accepting the things that make us different and making sure our children grow up healthy mentally in spite of it is one thing. Saying that a child can't will only enable them to not and live with that.
The reason I am typing as extensively and as passionately as I am is that I want to make sure that others with dyslexic children can get factual information. Please don't take it as an attack. I have faced this issue for 8 years and various issues with my two sons their entire lives so it is something I become passionate about.
Gifted children often do have one or more learning difficulties. Finding them, tailoring programs to their specific needs, and then being very proactive about it, gifted kids, if only because they are gifted, have a high chance of overcoming those difficulties.
I am glad for your child you are so passionate about it! Whether we agree or not its great that we both see the strengths in these kids! It sounds like you are doing some interesting things!
Regardless of your son being gifted or not or what the test scores were, there are many things you can do at home to encourage learning and help him love to learn. Check out some homeschooling resources for ideas about teaching different subjects in creative ways. Children learn from their experiences and environment so learning doesn't have to be formal study. For example, a trip to a museum with short explanations or discussions about what he's seeing can teach him a lot. Any kind of manipulative activity is good as well - give him a set of Lincoln Logs, tinker toys, or any kind of building toy, a set of magnets, items to be sorted in different ways, etc. I've heard many times that music study is stimulating for the brain. I think it was supposed to help with math and logic somehow but I don't know exactly. Still, it's a wonderful thing to know how to play an instrument.
I think the book "What the Rest of Us Can Learn from Homeschooling" by Linda Dobson is a good resource for learning how to encourage your child's learning and augment their formal schooling. I don't homeschool but I was impressed with how the book explained what it is that many homeschooling parents do to teach their children.
I have really enjoyed reading this discussion, esp since I'm getting ready to take the test for special ed teaching in January. One thing that always has fascinated me is teaching children to read and to comprehend what they read. When my kids were younger I homeschooled them and my younger daughter learned to read during the summer before kindergarten from a book called Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. Actually the title was a bit misleading because she was into chapter books well before the 100th lesson, and read the first Harry Potter book before the end of kindergarten, and had finished the 4th one by the end of first grade!
My theory is that the reason the program worked so well is because we went so quickly. There was no time for frustration or her thinking that she wouldn't be able to learn to read--we just did it, and she experienced instant success. I have been told that this method also works very well for LD kids like those with dyslexia, and even works well with those with MR. I also believe that it worked so well because she got "mom time" and that the bonding caused her to have positive feelings about reading. This book is listed under the broad educational heading of "direct instruction" and DI tends to work well and be efficient. Who wants to spend a lot of time learning to read? I'd rather spend my valuable time reading. Well, I'm starting to sound like an advert, and that's not why I'm saying this--I just know it worked well for us.
To the OP: since you live way out in the sticks, can you interest your son in studying nature and wildlife? He could collect bugs, study animal tracks, geology, plant medicines or uses, etc--there is a lot of stuff to study in the outdoors. Or if you have a 4-H nearby, he could take up projects and keep animals or. . . There's a lot you guys can do--stuff doesn't have to be cultural to be educational. When we were traveling a couple of years ago, we found some great books by Gerald Durrell about his childhood in Crete, and the funny things that happened because of his collections of animals and other specimens. He also wrote a very nice book with lots of great pictures, called The Amateur Naturalist which tells how to collect specimens and how to preserve and display them.
Be careful not to read too much into test results at such a young age. It is normal for 1st graders to have differences +/- 24 months as emerging readers. A high verbal score could indicate a child who had high reading readiness skills as a result of extra home involvement and/or a good pre-school/kindergarten program.
Non verbal is a good indicator of natural problem solving/intuitive learning and may be an early sign of higher-ability thinking.
You also should take caution and not have open conversations about your child's ability in front of your child. They will often carry your feelings into school. If they feel they are above the lesson, activity or program taking place in the classroom it could actually backfire on the teacher's ability to provide your child with more enrichment.
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